Consulting, leadership and diversity in the global development sector
In this long read I use an auto-ethnographic approach, drawing on concepts from psychoanalysis and the social sciences, to reflect on recent experience consulting in the international development sector. In doing so I bring out the following themes:
Pressures on consulting firms to generate revenue and win projects and the implications on team composition and how People of Colour are positioned;
Group identity and cohesion and its effects on psychological safety and leadership dynamics and;
Dynamics within the client organisation and their impacts on the consulting team and in particular People of Colour
A colourful entry
Thanks to an introduction by a generous acquaintance (a white woman) I (a brown skinned man with a Sanskritic name and a Southern English accent located in London, UK) was invited to lead a team at a European consulting firm to run (on a contract basis) an evaluation of a grant portfolio for, what the firm considered was, an important client, based in North America. I was thrilled and accepted the offer, with the assignment lasting about a year. The client was represented primarily by two people – the primary contact being a brown skinned woman with a South Asian accent, located in North America representing the interests of the broader client organisation and the second, a white woman with a North American accent, located in Europe representing the interests of the portfolio.
Within the consulting team, leadership was split into three roles. I as team leader was accountable for content, a project manager was accountable for administration while a project director (who was in effect my line manager) was accountable for the relationship with the client. There was also a deputy team leader. The consulting team was one of the most diverse I’ve been a part of. Differences were both visible and invisible. There were men and women, people with different skin tones, different accents, people born, brought up and living in different places, people with differently sounding names and those who were both neuro diverse and neuro typical. Most of the core team were based in the UK with those in the wider team spread more widely.
An inauspicious start
We got off to a difficult start when the electronic contract from the client ended up in the junk folder belonging to somebody in the consulting firm. This meant we started several weeks later than anticipated. An experienced project manager (a woman, with brown skin and a South Asian accent) who was written into the bid decided to resign and was on her way out. She was replaced by someone with limited project management experience (a black man with a West African accent). The project director, a white man with an English accent (who I learnt sat in a programme that did not specialise in the issue we had been asked to evaluate) went on holiday for a part of the inception period and was temporarily replaced by another senior member of the consulting firm.
I also learnt that the client had commissioned the same firm to conduct an evaluation of the same portfolio five years previously and understandably wanted the same team members to conduct the latest evaluation. But those members, external contractors, were either unavailable or uninterested. The core consulting team talked briefly to one member of the previous team - an experienced white woman. We asked her questions about the portfolio and lessons from the evaluation but didn’t ask why she declined to join the team.
During an early video meeting with the client, a member of the consulting team (the deputy team leader), said we couldn’t find a copy of the evaluation produced by the previous team for the client five years ago. I winced, feeling a degree of shame. The director came to me privately and said he was annoyed and questioned why the said individual would want to say that in front of the client. Although we later found and read the reports and slide decks that were produced, the client expressed their disappointment about team selection.
To add to this, the task seemed to have a wide scope, while I had limited involvement in its design (those who did were employed by the firm). The wider consulting team comprised a large number of people (up to 20 at one point) in various time zones, many of whom I hadn’t worked with before and were like me, freelance contractors. And given the post pandemic period where clients assumed work could take place remotely, in-person contact with the client and amongst the team was limited or non-existent. I also found myself frequently in conflict with the deputy team leader.
I felt a sense of overwhelm. When I asked the client, during one of our regular video meetings, that we extend the inception period (due to the stray contract) so that we didn’t have to rush the process and cut corners, they said no and insisted we cut short the inception period and stick to the schedule outlined in the proposal. I paused, took a risk and said that I felt deflated. The woman with a South Asian accent smiled nervously, unable to comprehend what had happened, while the other, after a pause, suggested, perhaps, we could compromise and find a deadline that would work. I wondered if she had connected with my vulnerability in the moment.
Later the project director was critical of me for being too ‘expressive’ with the client, fearing it would damage the firm’s relationship with them. This was reinforced in private feedback to the director after the project ended (which was relayed to me) where the woman who had suggested a compromise said I was too sensitive and lacked resilience. She felt she had to buoy me up at the time, which she would preferred not to have done. The director in his response to the client said he did not expect that kind of behaviour of the firm’s contractors. I was left with a deep sense of shame and inadequacy.
Francesca Cardona says everything is there at the beginning if only you are able to see and interpret it. So what might we make of this somewhat inauspicious start?
Economic pressures, an emphasis on form and the positioning of People of Colour
The most interesting and lucrative leadership and consulting opportunities amongst freelance workers don’t come through formal transparent competitive tender processes or listservs and email groups but through informal and social networks. But people with characteristics that deviate from the majority or those with less social status are less likely to be amongst the more powerful networks. In this case, the generosity of a well connected white woman was key.
Despite the non-availability of key staff and consultants, the firm went to great lengths to put together a team to respond to client demand. I wondered if the firm had used a ‘bait and switch’ strategy, promising but unable to promote, a degree of continuity. The pressures to win work seemed enormous. Given the capitalist economic system we live in, private consulting firms in the global development sector, are under pressure to bring in revenue and to make profit. The prospect of losing an assignment from a wealthy client to another consulting firm and the fear of potentially losing out on future income flows was too much to bear.
In a context where diversity is still relatively high up on the organisational agenda and where a progressive image is important for visibility and funding purposes, our team certainly looked good and appointing a project leader who was non-white, in a majority white context, was seen an affirmative action.
The choice of me as leader as somebody with South Asian heritage is worth thinking about. Middle class people with South (as well as East) Asian heritage are increasingly prominent in global development circles (and in the professional services more broadly), especially in an Anglo-Saxon context (US, Canada, UK). They are often seen as a model minority or the ‘good immigrant’ and associated with being reasonably well educated, reliable, hardworking as well as subservient to the needs of the broader system. And historically, according to race science, a precursor of Eugenics, lighter skinned Indians from North India were seen as intelligent as white Europeans. I subsequently benefited from such associations (even if my parents were from the East), but as I say later, they also hindered me.
In any case, I argue, the appointment of a high proportion of people of colour to the core team was an example of the ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon where members of minority groups are appointed to leadership or important positions in a high-risk situation where chances of ‘failure’ are high, thus perpetuating tropes and stereotypes about their capacity. This was confirmed when towards the end of the project, I heard that a prominent member of the previous team, a white male, declined to join the team as he considered dynamics at both the consulting firm and the client were less than ideal.
Given the wounding nature of leadership, the firm (consciously or unconsciously) mobilised or positioned me to take up a difficult role – I was handed a poisoned chalice. It seemed a familiar story. I wished consulting firms would ‘pick’ me for more ‘routine projects’ (if there is such a thing) and not just the difficult ones.
At the end of the project, even if I thought I had written up a reasonably informative report (with the help of inputs from various others), the client felt the process wasn’t to their liking saying they would have preferred working with two more prominent evaluation team leaders, both white women, whom they, in their dealings with the same firm, had worked with in the past. I suggest that the client had projected into me, the racialised other, feelings of inadequacy as a way of managing their anxiety. The phrase ‘having to work twice as hard to get half as far’ came to mind and I wondered the extent to which these white women were idealised as saviours and totemic of power and authority in the global development sector. I also feared irreparable damage to what reputation I had.
Interestingly, a lot of the frustration levelled at me and the consulting team was channelled through the brown skinned female representative of the client. Exchanges with her often left me and other members of the team feeling stupid and inadequate. Members of the consulting firm often name checked her as a difficult and anxious individual who they had to placate. However, taking a more systemic perspective, I argue that, while she may have had a pre-disposition to be brusque with others, she was mobilised by the client organisation to take up the role of ‘bad cop’ with impunity and ensure senior leaders had the information they needed to make decisions. In addition, my feeling of shame and inadequacy likely mirrored the feelings of inadequacy amongst a cadre of staff in the client organisation who did not work on specific portfolios but worked across them, and subsequently lacked specific content knowledge.
The mobilisation of people with South Asian heritage to take up difficult roles in both the consulting firm and the client organisation was arguably a re-enactment of the past, in which the British government mobilised South Asians to do work it was reluctant to do itself – i.e. protect and expand its territory in both Africa and Asia. For instance, Mahmoud Mamdani eloquently describes how the British facilitated informal colonisation of East Africa by Indians, first as soldiers, to quell mutinies amongst African soldiers organised by the British, then as railway workers and shopkeepers and finally as administrators, clerks and teachers to help manage the East African protectorate politically and economically.
Weak group identity, inadequate safety and dependency
This firm, like many others, was somewhat of a ‘body shop’, contracting in a high number of freelance contractors to undertake work, which allows it to maintain limited overheads and alleviate ongoing pressures to find enough work to cover people’s salaries. However, in this context, people assembled to work together in teams were unlikely to have prior experience working together. This was certainly true in this instance. To add to the complexity, contractors (like me) were not privy to commercial information such as people’s fee rates, which meant I was not allowed to be part of conversations with other contractors to discuss e.g. their scope of work, and the implications on the overall task.
Add to this a reliance on virtual interactions and what we had was the absence of a coherent collective, group or ‘we’ identity. At the start of the project, I thought ‘we’ were largely a collection of individuals looking after our own interests rather than a team working towards a shared task. And this may have led to the said individual ‘confessing’ to the client that she did not know where the previous evaluation report was stored. We often talk about the role of individuals in organisations, but rarely do we talk about the role of organisations in individuals. Arguably the team, the firm and the task had yet to take hold in the psyche of team members.
This environment made having difficult conversations challenging. Good teamwork required a shared history among people who were willing to take risks and expose their ‘not knowing’ to one another. In the absence of this shared history, members of the consulting team tended to be overly polite with any difficult exchange taking place via email. When I invited team members to give me feedback on my leadership approach during a regular team meeting in the inception phase and whether they were willing to be led by me (to secure ‘authorisation from below’), I got a muted response. The director later said I was brave to expose myself in this way. Saying something which might leave anyone psychologically injured was subsequently a risky proposition, leaving us unable to talk about our collective vulnerabilities and imperfections.
When the client expressed disappointment with preliminary findings (which I talk about below), the project director had 1-2-1s with team members about my performance and fed this back to me. People’s perceptions or projections about me and my actions were taken as fact. I was left feeling it was my word against theirs. Even if leadership was tripartite arrangement the director felt the need to locate the difficulty in an individual – i.e. me. We were unable to talk about this as a group.
The contract being diverted into the junk folder and the temporary and permanent departure of key staff suggested the organisation was fleeing from its task, perhaps because of difficult collective memories of working with the same client previously. With a fragmented team, coupled with a predisposition for doing a lot for groups, it left me holding a lot on behalf of the organisation and might explain that feeling of overwhelm I experienced. I subsequently found myself doing some of the work of the project manager, developing workplans and allocating days across the team.
This was a dynamic in which the team became overly dependent on its leader. But this wasn’t necessarily unique: this was a dynamic often seen in organisations providing expert services especially in the global development sector, where leaders have had to take on a lot, on behalf of their team or organisation – in part a colonial legacy - leading to high levels of stress and burnout amongst leaders.
In this project, I mitigated this, at least for a few months, by scheduling a regular one to one meeting with the project director. He was able to provide me with some sympathy, validation as well as managerial support, helping me to move from an anxious state of mind to a more neutral one where I was more able to think and reflect on what might done to address problems. However, as workload pressures increased for the director, these meetings ceased to take place.
Acting out client dynamics, leadership approaches and intersectionality
I wondered about the conflict I found myself with the deputy team leader during the inception phase. We found ourselves in heated discussions again early on during the delivery phase. They were a North American woman with East Asian heritage. We had worked together previously in our careers. This shared history most likely gave us the safety and courage to spar with each other and have somewhat difficult conversations. But in prior conversations, we tended not to disagree with each other. So this time seemed odd.
Given the issues we were grappling with, I suspected that the two of us were ‘acting out’ or mirroring the unresolved tensions between the two representatives from the client organisation, who had different interests in, and expectations of, this assignment. Later in the assignment, this became clear, as the team received advice from each client rep, which contradicted each other, and which they couldn’t reconcile themselves. And I didn’t have the courage to name this either, given my earlier reprimand for being honest about my limitations, resulting in making and then reversing changes to the report on a number of occasions.
During delivery, I appointed the deputy team leader to work on a particular task. I had hoped she would set out in some detail how she would deliver on it. Coupled with signals from another team member (a Black American woman) alluding to the difficulty of the task, I subsequently ‘lent in’, moved away from a more hands off approach, asked her several questions about the parameters of the task and asked that we meet regularly to review the work.
While some might see this as micromanagement, Simon Western sees this as part of the ‘Leader as controller’ discourse with an emphasis on task, control, efficiency and effectiveness (one of four broad discourses of leadership). During our regular discussions, the two women complained I was being too interventionist and that they had been positioned as data collectors and not analysers/thinkers. But this did not resonate with me.
What might have been happening? This may have been indicative of an ambivalence towards being reliant on the team leader, known in psycho-analytic terms as a ‘hatred of dependency’. But I wondered if the discomfort experienced might be playing out along existing fissures of race and gender. Given historical precedents, I might have been seen as the exploitative Indian man. From a gendered perspective men had historically abused their power in relation to women. While from a racial point of view, I wondered whether I was seen as the ‘bad’ Indian, representative of the Indians who were mobilised by the British to e.g. take up the role of foreman in a sugar plantation in East Africa who would be looking to extract the last ounce of labour from vulnerable African workers, or the Indian policeman who the British mobilised to protect their interests in places like Hong Kong. Had I identified with the bad Indian who couldn’t trust anyone?
Perfection, positivity and the elimination of difference
I was curious about the insistence that we cut short the inception period. I wondered if this was indicative of a culture within the client organisation to achieve results in short time frames, with a focus on perfection and little room for manoeuvre. In addition, the reprimand I received for saying I felt deflated I thought was illustrative of a tendency in orthodox management practice to ignore one’s feelings, or if one didn’t, to focus only on positive emotions, drawing on the positive psychology movement, where one brought their ‘best self’ to the workplace, leaving difficult feelings at home.
However, positive emotions and negative emotions are often tightly coupled. Picking up on the vibrations of the client team and soaking up their dynamics like a sponge, I wonder if my feeling of being deflated and the feeling of shame I subsequently felt mirrored a sense of being deflated and shame within the client team and that the tendency to bury or focus on positive feelings was a way of avoiding getting in touch with the difficult effects of working in an aggressive work environment. I also wondered if the client team, feeling under significant pressure, subsequently projected massive competence into the consulting team expecting us to be omnipotent - able to do anything in no time at all.
In addition, although there was an imaginary boundary between our consulting team and the client group, I sensed we had lost our power to manage that interface, becoming subservient to every client demand and unable to deviate from client norms and preferences. The emphasis was on alignment, a frequently used term in organisational life. While my superficial difference might have been welcomed from a corporate perspective, my more substantive differences - evolved out of living in the margins of groups and society more generally, in a lot of my early life - seemed like they were certainly not. More broadly, the marginalised tend not to be listened to, as those with power find it hard to hear, partly because of psychological distance and partly because what is said is inconvenient.
A focus on perfection and the aggression with which it was pursued was illustrated when the client responded to a set of preliminary findings with anger and disappointment. We had agreed to sharing findings from only the first of four components to the evaluation. I had put together the content using PowerPoint slides which was edited by a graphic designer and approved by the project director. However, the client in their feedback were disappointed that the findings did not contain information from other components and said the content was poorly presented.
The team had to accelerate analysis of other components of the work, increasing stress levels within the team. This was followed by a strong sense of disappointment amongst the client team when the first draft of the report was received. There was an expectation that we would get it ‘right first time’ rather than through an iterative process of feedback and revision. I wondered if in the client organisation, there was no such thing as preliminary findings. Findings were findings, especially if they were written down. They could be circulated even if they weren’t supposed to and if they weren’t up to the right standard could have severe implications for the relevant staff member.
Power and its damaging impact on People of Colour
The new project manager struggled to take up his role effectively and, after he accidentally copied in a member of the client organisation when he wasn’t supposed to, the client asked the firm that he be replaced with somebody more experienced. The consulting firm subsequently did so – albeit temporarily, with a younger woman living in the US, with an American accent and with African heritage on a contract basis. However, given rules around contractors not having access to commercial details, the project manager remained in charge of the budget. He was absent from interactions with the client organisation but went on working behind the scenes.
To add to this, given the feedback I received from the director in response to the feedback we received to the preliminary findings, the high level of stress and sense of not being good enough, I offered my resignation. I sensed the client would have preferred this, but that the firm had no choice but to soldier on with me at the helm given the lack of any alternative. They subsequently contracted in one of the more prominent evaluators the client were familiar with (an older white woman) to coach me and give me advice. In addition, a senior member of the organisation who had worked on the previous evaluation, (a white male) who was rated highly by one of the two members of the client group was brought into provide additional ‘quality assurance’.
While this was helpful, I did not feel properly ‘authorised’ by the wider team, with some prominent members refusing to heed my comments to their work. Moreover, I noted at the start of the project that the days allocated to me were likely to be insufficient given the scale of the task. Half-way through the project, when I made a request for additional paid time I was met with a sternly worded email from the director. This was followed by a video meeting where he spent most of it in an angry state of mind, questioning why he wasn’t made aware of me approaching the last of my paid time and why I needed more. I wondered if, realising this project was unlikely to make much profit for the consulting organisation, and unable to give feedback to the project manager (a point I return to later), he needed to locate his frustration (which he was likely holding on behalf of the consulting firm) in me. We were only able to negotiate an increase in my time, after he moved into a calmer state of mind where he could think and reflect. This contrasted starkly with his much more measured response when a white woman with a North American accent asked for more time.
In the drive to deliver to the client an attractive product, a busy graphic designer employed by the consulting firm, a brown skinned woman with an English accent was unable to find the time to ‘beautify’ the slide deck in the way that we had hoped. Frustrated, the project director got in touch with her manager where stern words were shared. The designer was subsequently side-lined in favour of an externally contracted graphic design firm led by an older white woman.
So we see that the pressure to get things done and do so in a way that ensured conformity and alignment with client demands took its toll on people who had characteristics that deviated from those who made up the majority (in a UK context). Feelings of anger and frustration generated by the work and the demanding nature of the client were left with People of Colour, shaped by racial stereotypes.
At the same time, the project director seemed unwilling/unable to take up with the client organisation, how ‘we’ as a consulting team were being treated, saying he felt powerless. I wondered if he felt powerless for two reasons. Firstly, the fear of the client withholding payment and going elsewhere with their future custom if he made them feel uncomfortable. Secondly, a history of older white males being and being seen as cruel and incompetent in an international context, which was particularly significant given his opposite number was a brown skinned woman with a South Asian accent. The director was unable to see how he could use his power for the good of the team, many of whom were People of Colour. To stand up to her would presumably be seen as a re-enactment of something colonial and misogynistic. But given that the team were mainly People of Colour, he might have felt less compelled to provide protection. However, I felt that by not being more directive he did end up acting out the very perceptions he was trying to avoid – i.e. being cruel and incompetent.
Being set up to fail and turning a blind eye
Let’s return to the case of the project manager: why did he struggle or appear to struggle? The firm had good intentions in wanting to recruit people born and brought up in the Global South, particularly the African continent. However, he seemed more suited to a leadership or a technical role rather than an administrative role. This seemed to play out when at various points at the start of the project he provided technical advice and at another, his frustration at having to take up this role, slipped out, suggesting he felt demeaned at having to arrange meetings and monitor budgets.
When I quizzed the director personally about why the manager had not been recruited into a different (and more senior role), he said that was the way things were done here. He recounted his own experience – saying despite having considerable work experience (albeit in a different sub-sector) he joined as a project manager and rose through the ranks to where he was now. However, I guessed this was not how things were done in the context in which the manager had emerged, where age, seniority and responsibility went hand in hand.
The systems and processes which governed the evaluation firm seemed fairly rigid, unable to accommodate the needs of the manager, who instead had to accommodate the needs of the firm, with what seemed like very limited support from his colleagues. I wondered if he had been set up to fail. I also imagined historically people from the global North being flown out to work in parts of Africa and Asia receiving both material and emotional support from local and expatriate staff.
I argue that the job of manager was far from easy, comprising a wide range of tasks. His very visible difference made his struggles more visible for others to see. In addition, I wondered whether people’s expectations that the manager would struggle (perhaps due to his culture and race) resulted him actually struggling. This is known as projective identification where people project qualities which they cannot hold themselves into another person, who then introjects, or takes in those qualities and believes him/her-self to have those qualities.
This seemed to be evidenced when I asked him and his team if there were guidelines that spelt out the range of tasks required to undertake an evaluation, given some contention about the sequencing of tasks. I received a short email from the director without anyone in copy saying what I said was likely to hurt the man in question, and he felt he didn’t need to answer to me. It seemed the director and (perhaps his team) located their fragility and vulnerability in the manager, feeling he couldn’t receive criticism, perhaps unconsciously associating him with one of the client organisation’s beneficiaries. ‘His’ fragility was subsequently used to defend the organisation against my questions about organisational systems and processes.
I found watching the manager struggle with his duties uncomfortable. I also found the project was suffering to some extent. Given my predisposition to do a lot for groups, I took on some of his responsibilities. And not want to be a by-stander, I emailed the manager’s line manager and asked whether he was getting the support he needed. I received a polite rebuff. Despite workplace inclusion drives being commonplace in the sector, acknowledging and talking about the issue seemed difficult. Why so? Ignoring and denying difference serves to protect people’s identities and help them defend against feelings of unconscious guilt and shame. This seemed to play out early on in the assignment when I acknowledged my pleasure at seeing lots of people of colour in the team. The very people of colour I was acknowledging failed to respond and looked blankly into their screens – indicating the difficulty this issue provokes in people of all colours.
Secondly, the reaction reflected political correctness, where racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination were all in the process of being defeated, rather than something to continuously struggle with. One was therefore good or bad, which in turn froze people’s ability to think and reflect openly. Thirdly at an institutional level, it served to maintain the status quo in terms of power and control. Not surprisingly, there was a preference to turn a blind eye.
Concluding remarks
When it comes to diversity and inclusion in organisations, there tends to be an emphasis on quantitative targets and numbers. What this case study suggests is the need to consider qualitative knowledge of e.g. people’s experience as well. Key questions include:
How is the energy in a team or organisation channelled? Who is left with what in terms of feelings and perceptions, and what patterns are there in terms of identity characteristics/social status?
How strong is group identity and what are the implications on the extent to which the team talk about its vulnerabilities and imperfections
How do business processes shape people’s experience at work, especially those with characteristics that deviate from those of the majority?
Who is able to connect with their power and who is not? What gets in the way?
Consultancies and think tanks located in North America and Europe and operating in the international development sector often say they strive to reduce inequalities ‘out there’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But teams and organisations, in doing their work, can unwittingly reproduce internally, the very dynamics they are trying to eliminate in their environment, i.e. the power asymmetries between different groups of people (based on geographical location, gender, race, class, etc). By addressing inequalities amongst themselves ‘in here’, they just might be in a better position to do so ‘out there’.